Geo Notification on app that is off

Question

Geo Fencing is praised by many, yet I could not easily find an answer to the following.

iOS and/or Android, does an inactive app send you notifications if you are close by?

My question is probably more like: is there an underlying system that knows your app needs to check for your location against the in-app locations and does so despite the app not being active.

Forget the settings where you can switch off geolocation for particular apps, let's assume that is switched on.

But let's assume I just switched my iphone on, no app is running yet. So I am carrying that sleeping phone in my pocket. Would I receive location notifications?

I am currently testing this with Highlight, but maybe someone knows the code/tech side to this answer.

Answer 1

Varies by OS.

• On Android, apps can run as a service that are automatically started when the phone boots up. In this case, the user does not need to start the app. So, on Android, yes you would receive location notifications in sleep mode. See http://developer.android.com/guide/components/services.html or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9866970/tutorial-for-android-services for more info on Android Services.

• On Apple, I'm not so sure about running apps as a service like Android. However, I believe there are events that apps in the background can register for. So again, the app (once started) would receive notifications in sleep mode.